Monday, October 11, 2010

2nd Ed.: Paul Feyerabend, AGAINST METHOD.

Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994) was one of the twentieth century's most famous philosophers of science, and remains an influential figure in this field and in the sociology of scientific knowledge.

Against Method examines the deficiencies of many widespread ideas about scientific progress and the nature of knowledge. Feyerabend argues that scientific advances can only be understood in historical context. He looks at the way the philosophy of science has consistently overemphasized practice over method, and considers the possibility that anarchism could replace rationalism in the theory of knowledge.

Feyerabend’s book ranks alongside classic works such as Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery, and Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. However, in seeking to outline an anarchist theory of scientific knowledge, Against Method challenges these canonical theoretical models by making a radical new contribution to the philosophy of science.

First published in 1975, the book stands as an intellectual testament to the ferment of the 1960s, challenging as it does many of the reigning orthodoxies within the philosophy of science. The book’s original publication sparked considerable argument within a number of academic disciplines, and its central arguments are still relevant today, given the considerable popularity enjoyed by the “new rationalism” propounded by popular scientists such as Richard Dawkins.

This updated edition of the classic text includes a new introduction by Ian Hacking, one of the world’s most important contemporary philosophers of science. Hacking reflects on both Feyeraband’s life and personality as well as the broader significance of the book for current discussions.

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WHAT IS 'THEORY'?

Institutionalised philosophy has before it something called 'philosophy,' which is emphatically not philosophy, that does not follow the protocols of that discipline, that does not measure up to apparently transparent standards of logical rigour and clarity. . . . This institutionalised 'philosophy,' which is not itself, produces another paradox as well: it proliferates a second philosophy outside the boundary that philosophy itself has set, and so it seems that philosophy has unwittingly produced this spectral double of itself. It may be that what is practised as philosophy in most of the language and literature departments . . . has come to constitute the meaning of 'philosophy,' and so the discipline of philosophy must find itself strangely expropriated by a double. And the more it seeks to dissociate itself from this redoubled notion of itself, the more effective it is in securing the dominance of this other philosophy outside the boundary that was meant to contain it. (Judith Butler, "Can the 'Other' of Philosophy Speak?" 241)

I shall use the word ‘theorist’ rather than ‘philosopher’ because the etymology of ‘theory’ gives me the connotation I want, and avoids some I do not want. The people I shall be discussing do not think that there is something called ‘wisdom’ in any sense of the term which Plato would have recognised. So the term ‘lover of wisdom’ seems inappropriate. But theoria suggests taking a view of a large stretch of territory from a considerable distance, and this is just what the people I shall be discussing do. They all specialise in standing back from, and taking a large view of, what Heidegger called the ‘tradition of Western metaphysics’ – what I have been calling the ‘Plato-Kant canon.’ (Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity 96)

Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me. (Sigmund Freud)

A man with one theory is lost. He needs several of them, or lots! He should stuff them in his pockets like newspapers. (Bertolt Brecht)

Something is happening to the way we think about the way we think. (Clifford Gertz, "Blurred Genres: the Refiguration of Social Thought" 20)

The history of thought is the history of its models. (Frederic Jameson, The Prison-House of Language)